Students are Warned for Phishing E-mails by University of Delaware

The university of Delaware (UD)(US), is cautioning its students of a new phishing emails is presently socializing in the internet and seems to be from the university's information technologies department, reported newsworks.org on march 12, 2012.

The university's information technologies department says the emails started arriving in student's inboxes on March 8, 2012. "Your webmail account is restricted "is the subject line of the phishing email.

The phishing emails explains:"we recognized irregular action on email system on March 8, 2012. As the primary owner, you must confirm your account activity before you can continue using your account, and upon verification, we will delete the restrictions placed on it.

This text is followed by a link which the recipients of the email is asked to click.

And, in the search of authentic and legitimate to the recipient the emails also carries some genuine text. It reads:"webmail services has reserved a system maintenance window of Saturday from 4am to 8 am that will be used only if webmail service needs to perform any work that will take the system offline otherwise, IT officials noted, the system will be around.

IT officials comment that if the recipient of the email hover his computer mouse over that link that allegedly goes to UD's webmail service, he will see that the link would take to a suspected site.

Consequently, in order to attempt to help mitigate these attacks, the IT department has suggested some security tips, which are, firstly never provide personal information or username and passwords in an email, as has been demanded in the aforementioned phishing email. Remember that no university will ever request your username, password or other personal information by email. Secondly, do not click links in emails. Instead, type the URL of the site one is trying to reach in a new browser window or tab.

Finally, only university of Delaware doesn't receive phishing attack in recent times. In the last week of February 2012, also California University, California, IT department bewared its students of the scam email that alleged that the recipient account is indulged in various spam activities.

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» SPAMfighter News - 3/21/2012